Hi everyone,
This is the Zcash Foundation’s Engineering update for Sprint 11 (May 26th - June 6th) of 2025.
During this sprint we have continued the work started last sprint to finish off the last remaining RPC methods required to enable zebra to replace zcashd in the new Z3 stack. As part of the work to support ZIP-213 we’ve added support for configuring shielded addresses for mining. We have continued working on adding the valuePools and chainSupply fields to the getblock RPC method response as well as updating the getaddressbalance RPC method for block explorer usage. We have also continued tackling a potential DoS vulnerability in the getblocktemplate RPC which is proving trickier than expected to reproduce and test.
We are very close to making the zebra-rpc crate explicitly usable by RPC clients such as Zaino and have been working on ensuring that zebra-rpc can work both as a server and client library. We are still working on a way to notify RPC clients when there has been a change to the mempool.
Finally we implemented an optimisation to cache the sighash context so that it can be reused when validating transactions.
We continued to mostly firefight on the devops front, fixing some test breakages as a result of changes in the latest lightwalletd release, working on a couple of issues related to how and when we select and use cached states in CI and allowing a test that has been timing out to run for longer whilst we investigate the cause for the increased running time.
We also improved the way that CI works on PRs from external forks, preventing GCP workflow failures and ensuring that individual contributors can run jobs on their forks.
Thank you for reading!